I've written quite a few DVD's. At 16x, I've gotten occasional errors (using the same brand of media all the while) - about 1 in 25 fails to write. I recently started writing at 4x, I'm finding I've gotten no errors and no unreadable disks. I'm starting to think I should write all my important dvd's at this low speed.

I've also written dvd's only to have them pass the initial "verification", then about a month later, try to use them only to find that parts of them have become unreadable.

2 Answers
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It help a little, but I would also be aware that disk rotating at much lower speed is getting burned much more that designed and that can cause problems also. Higher speed DVDs have also more sensitive layer.

Best bet would be to leave it on auto since most (if not all) DVD writters test their burn intensity anyhow.

I assume that big part of you problem here is not writting speed but batch of bad DVD media.

Generally if you run your burning software on "Auto" it'll burn at the fastest speed it can with the drive and media ok. Normally if I keep getting bad burns it's because the DVD's I purchased aren't very good, or if you haven't used the drive yet maybe the drive is defective.

The risk of buffer under runs and such were much more common in the early days of CD burners, but today it really isn't much of an issue. Todays burning software and hardware is much better at preventing burn issues.